Monica, Marcia, Mallory, Kelsey somehow got me here

The little Asian lady who strolled up behind me on the Wally World parking lot seemed to have a smile in her voice when she commented, "You look like you're having fun!" She was right, of course; I don't often pull out my cell phone to use its camera function, but the two cars parked in the next lane were just too much fun for me: one was a faded brown Chrysler New Yorker from the early ’80s, the other a blue Mazda 323 from probably the early ’90s. To any other shopper this evening, they were just a couple of slightly damaged old cars; to me, they were a swirl  of memories of the "pretty car" I drove when the kids were small and Mokey Mazda, the first car each of them drove as they reached driving age.

Cars have always seemed like members of the family to me, from my earliest vague memories of the green woodie station wagon Daddy drove to the red and white, nine-passenger Chevy with its funny little jump seat so we smaller kids could crawl into the back, through a series of sedans up to the day Daddy proudly drove home in a sad little Corvair Monza that he announced was mine. From that day on, it's never mattered what anybody else was driving; the only car that had a personality was the one that belonged to me.

It wasn't always easy. Daddy had never been able to spring for a car for the three older siblings, and even though this one had been a steal at $150, it was probably still about $150 more than he had available to spend on a car for me. I didn't know that the dual-carburetor engine was supposed to be a cool thing, and I really didn't know that its cousin, the Monza Spyder, was a source of pride among sports car enthusiasts. I just knew Daddy had given away my dog and come home in this junker of a car.

For all I know, my little Monica Monza was a Spyder, but when I first drove her to school, she was mostly a huge embarrasment. For one thing, she was a 1961 vehicle on a 1967 parking lot, and for another, her rear-engine design made her the target of a campaign as "unsafe at any speed." (Later research showed that those claims were irrational, but still—I was only 17.) Worst of all, the previous owner had done his best to drive her wheels off, and I carried a gallon of gasoline in an old plastic bleach jug so I could prime those fine twin carburetors when the car wouldn't start on its own, which turned out to be most afternoons after school. In those days, we didn't think of carrying gasoline in a Clorox jug as being dangerous, but having to wait until the newer cars cleared the parking lot so I could drag out my gasoline and prime my carburetors was appalling. I could hardly wait for the school year to be over, which thankfully was a matter of only a couple of weeks.

As soon as I was safely home for the summer, Daddy pulled Monica into the carport and went to work on her. Stem to stern, bolt by bolt, he took apart every moving part and put it back together again. (A neighbor lady threatened to acquire additional car parts to add to his collection to see if he'd try to put them back in the Monza, too.) He had it ticking along beautifully a few weeks before time for my senior year to start, and since I no longer needed to prime the carburetors and the car was a new, shiny red with a fashionable white vinyl roof, I was tickled to have wheels I could take just about anywhere I wanted to go. Who cares that Anne Andres had a brand-new, baby blue Dodge Challenger? or Ann Anderson had the latest in new Mustangs? I had wheels!

And drive I did. I became the driver to get Little Brother to school; he cracked me up the afternoon he came bouncing out of the junior high school, thumped his palm on the trunk (which was in the front where otherwise the hood would have been), and announced that he was Joe Marvin Alligator Duck, a nickname that followed him around for at least the rest of the school year, usually shortened to Joe Duck.

I was the editor of the high school paper that year, and one morning a friend of mine and I made a 10-minute trip to the printer to approve the latest edition before it went to press. Only I made the mistake of letting my friend shift gears on my fancy three-on-the-floor drive, and he—like every other passenger except me and Joe Duck—managed to pull the stick completely out of the floorboards.That required me to coast into the Goodyear parking lot and call Daddy, who appeared a few minutes latter with a sheet of cardboard and a pair of pliers. He had us back on the road in 10 or 15 minutes, but it took longer than that to explain to Mrs. MacDonald why we were out of her class for so long.

Joe Duck and I were allowed to ride in Monica on family vacations, and we'd urge her up the hills of central Texas and then coast back down the other side. We didn't have air conditioning, but we rode with the wind in our hair and the radio on its highest volume, and we were in the car without Mother and Daddy—shear heaven to a couple of Texas teens.

When I went off to college the next fall, Joe Duck was 14 and had a driver's license, so Monica fell to him. After all, I was moving to Houston, and Daddy was the magic that made Monica run; she had to stay near him.

Three years later, Daddy suffered a massive coronary and died, and Mother declared the end of Monica Monza. She sent Joe Duck and me out in search of wheels on a promise to buy us each a car with Daddy's life insurance money. Our siblings were horrified: first, Daddy had given us Monica, and now Mother was buying us brand new cars. How spoiled we were!

The car I found was Marcia Malibu. Marcia had been a driver's ed car and was available for the same price as the smaller but sportier Chevy Nova that Joe Duck and I had first planned to buy. By that time, though, I was a college junior, and I was sure I needed a more sophisticated set of wheels. Besides, at that time, the Malibu was pretty much the darling of the road. Marcia was just on the inside of a tolerable shade of pea green,  but I was thrilled to call her my own. Besides, it was one of her regular service checkups that led me to my future spouse. I eagerly watched the miles turn over until she got to 99,993, when my spouse announced that she was at the end of the road, so he drove her off to sell. I didn't forgive him for a year for driving her off a handful of miles before I would have gotten to watch the odometer roll over to a whole new string of zeroes.

His replacement was the only car I've ever owned that didn't get a name. Remembering that Joe Duck and I had at one time planned to buy matching Novas, he had exchanged my used Malibu for a used Nova that never quite seemed "right" to me. A friend of mine had recently traded in her Oldmobile for a Pontiac Sunbird—a sort of a feminine version of the powerhouse Firebird that seemed like just the ticket for me—and another had gotten a new Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme. And I had a beat-up old Nova. When I drove it to Bryan to apply for a job and lost the watch Mother and Daddy had given me for high school graduation, I decided the Nova had eaten my watch, and that didn't endear it to me. I never knew what the husband was thinking.

Shortly thereafter, though, I got pregnant with Number One Son, and I found that the Sunbird would have had the same limitation the Nova had: getting a baby in and out of a sports coupe with only two doors wasn't really a lot of fun. When Second Son came along a couple of years later, getting two babies in and out of the back seat was an even bigger pain. This time, when Spouse drove my car off to purchase a different one, I didn't even watch him leave; I figured this one was good riddance.

When he came back a few hours later in a shiny new Chrysler New Yorker, I had to agree with toddler NOS, whose first enthusiastic comment when he saw the car was, "Look, Mom, that's a pretty car!" This one really was a pretty car, a deep chocolate brown with a "brougham" vinyl top and "wire" wheels that looked pretty slick, even if I do say so myself. I guess if I had thought about it much, I could have come up with a "people" name for a New Yorker, but NOS was so happy with Pretty Car that that's what we called it for the next eight years, through all sorts of adventures until the Pretty Car on the outside starting showing signs of being the Tired Out car on the inside.

It had certainly met my needs for being able to get to the kids in the back seat; in fact, when the school where I taught had a rasher of teachers losing car radios to on-campus theft, I commented one afternoon that I hoped my car wouldn't be "hit" because my spouse would blow a fuse. One of the students reassured me: "Oh, don't you worry, Mrs. W," he said, "nobody's going to hit your car. It's the one with the three baby seats in the back!"

In fact, it was the only car the kids remembered ever having (and the only one Darling Daughter had ever known) when we decided to trade it in on a Mazda minivan, so you'd have thought I was selling their souls along with it. The salesman, who had a daughter DD's age, had seen that scene enough that he let it play out patiently, and I promised the kids we'd get cherry slushes on the way home that they could drink in the back of the new van. I stopped by an upholstery shop on the way home to find out what to do about the red dye on the new carpet.

Monica and Marcia had had clearly feminine names, and Pretty Car could hardly be considered a "name" at all, so I decided the minivan needed something sort of "neutral." I came up with Mallory; I usually thought of the van itself as being feminine, but I liked the gender-indefinite sound of the name. Mallory took us through Cub Scouts and Girl Scouts and learning to drive and a divorce, and Mallory faithfully kept on rolling. Thank goodness I wasn't saddled with car payments during those first few years on my own; whatever else ex-spouse had done, he had taken care of me financially by paying off our bills as we got them, and I'm still grateful to him for that.

When NOS reached 16 and was eligible to learn to drive, I went shopping for wheels for kids to drive, and that's when the 323 came into the picture. I probably paid too much for her, and I probably could have gotten a better car for what I spent, but I got wheels that kids could drive, and all of them were thrilled. The kids had been great fans of Fraggle Rock when they were younger, and teenage NOS took about a minute to determine the new little car's name had to be Mokey.

Mokey survived a number of dents, bangs, and rattles during her years with us, but she was sturdy and reliable, and I was glad to have her. I have no idea where she went that she shouldn't have, but those are secrets the kids can keep to themselves; I'm pretty sure I don't want to know.

When Darling Daughter got old enough to drive, Second Son was still driving Mokey (NOS had moved out of the house and was on his own for wheels), so I shopped till I got a steal on a little Geo Metro that looked like a great little car that was just her size. The Metro was standard shift, so the day I drove it home I took DD out to a quiet road near the house and had her drive and shift and stop and drive until I thought I could trust her to navigate the traffic mixture of young drivers and pedestrians around her school.

One thing I was sure of with a young driver new at standard shift: no left turns. I chanted that over and over on the way back to the house and as she charged out the door in the morning. Thirty minutes later, she was back on the stoop, shaking, and saying, "Mom, I wanted you to see that I'm safe, but I've killed Macy." I think that was the car's name, anyway; I'd owned it for less than 24 hours, and she had, indeed, already killed it, trying to make a left turn out of our neighborhood onto the four-lane road that connects the west side of town to the local university. She had walked the three blocks back to the house to tell me.

"What on earth were you doing here?" I demanded when I got to the scene. (Okay, I was probably screaming at her, but I like to pretend I was calmer than that.)

"Going to school," she insisted. Duh. But why was she at this intersection, where she had no choice but to turn left? "There's no other way to get there!" she cried. One more time, I reminded her: right at the end of our street, right onto the main drag through our neighborhood, right onto the road that goes all the way to the high school, including through a stoplight that would get her safely across the four-lane. Right into the high school parking lot. Right, right, right, right—never left.

No matter how many times I play it over in my mind, it still winds up with four kids in a little car that was creamed by a much larger Ford Bronco. But then I snap back to reality and remember the firemen dancing around the little pile of rubble that had been my little car and saying, "Look! It did exactly what it was supposed to do! None of the kids got hurt!" And they were exactly right: my daughter and three of her best friends (that I had had no idea would be in the car with her) had all walked away completely unhurt because the little car's front end had completely crumpled, leaving it totalled but all of them unscathed.

Her dad was gracious enough to choke up his contribution to the cost of the car (which was insured, but not for damage to itself), and shortly thereafter he passed his own old pickup truck to SS, leaving Mokey for DD to drive.

A year or so later I acquired another used car for her, this time a Nissan Pulsar that was cute as a bug (she adored the t-tops!) but that turned out to be a money pit: I bought it cheap, but then I started a long line of repairs that soon showed me the error of my ways. The salesman had been a friend of the family, but the money-pit-on-wheels didn't do much for our relationship. Trixie got DD through her freshman year of college, and DD was truly irate when I refused to let her take Trixie off to school in Los Angeles; the one good result of that was that DD managed to get more money than I expected when she sold the car to a friend who had grown to love it and who managed to wreck it before discovering that the purchase might not have been such a great deal.

The summer before DD made the move to Los Angeles, I had decided the time had come for me to move out of the minivan, for a couple of reasons. For one, it was 12 years old and I was growing tired of it, even though it still wasn't pressing too hard on that once-important 100,000 miles; after all, it was new enough that even 100,000 miles wouldn't roll the odometer over to a full row of zeroes. For another, except for an occasional trip to the hardware store to by goods for a new project, I really didn't have much use for a vehicle that big. In fact, by then SS was driving a Ford F150 pickup truck, and the hardware store didn't have anything I needed that wouldn't fit in a pickup truck. It was time to move on.

I was determined to do my homework, so I read the consumer guides, read the car columns, and test drove the likely candidates—a couple of Toyotas and a couple of Hondas. I had friends and family who were Honda devotees, but of the cars I drove, the Toyotas seemed to "fit" me better, and at the last minute I jumped ship from a loaded-out sporty version of Toyota's small Corolla to its slightly larger and more widely admired Camry. Even the very bottom of the line (the biggest one I thought I could swing financially) was so much more than I had dreamed of that I felt pretty classy; I had driven poor old Mallory for so long that I had no idea how many cool new amenities were available in even the barest of cars.

In fact, I was nervous enough about making such a big purchase that I had decided to let SS, who had bought his own pickup after graduation from high school, help me make the decision. I was down to the last few items when I realized that the Camry didn't seem to have automatic door locks, which were more important to me as a safety feature in parking lots at night than for any other reason. I swung by the McDonald's where he was working so I could quiz him on that when I finally realized that on the car I was driving, the doors locked as soon as I shifted into gear and didn't unlock until I told them to. This car had possibilities!

I bought Kelsey Camry in May, than DD came home from her first year of college and got a job delivering pizzas. There was no way I trusted Trixie to get her through pizza delivery, much less moving to Los Angeles. On a June business trip to Houston, I dropped into a Hyundai dealership to see if the cheap little Accents they offered would make me feel any better. The saleslady who helped me seemed to know where I was coming from, but she discouraged me from considering the Accent, pointing out advantages for a mom to putting her kid in the slightly larger—but only slightly more expensive—Elantra. The purchase itself was a crazy experience, but long story short was that DD drove home in Emma about 36 hours after I had first started to shop. Emma had 6,000 miles worth of pizza delivery before she hauled me and DD to Los Angeles a couple of months later and more than 75,000 miles when DD traded her in a few months ago on her own first car purchase, a brand-new Mini Cooper.

And I've made one more recent car purchase, too. Kevin Cavalier sits in front the house these days for NOS, who has moved back home to start junior college and try to buy himself a new lease on life. Kevin is a 2003 Chevy who's seen some long, hard miles, but NOS is trained as a mechanic and can at least keep the wheels going around for a while longer; at least, that's what I'm hoping. So maybe Kevin has some meaning for me that I hadn't expected, too. And maybe he's going to make himself a part of our little family of cars.

It was nice this evening to be reminded of the Pretty Car and Mokey. They, too, somehow got me here.